Those Various Scalpels: Female Precision and Drone Aesthetics

• In Event: Women and Drones in the Perpetual State of Exception

Abstract

What logic underwrites the representation of “surgical” drone strike as the only effective response to the “cancer” (as Barack Obama repeatedly characterized it) of terrorism? Building on Caren Kaplan’s analysis of “precision targeting,” I argue that a surprising theoretical preoccupation of the early twentieth century—the all too machinic, uncannily unsexy movements of white female precision dancers, from Siegfried Kracauer’s indictment of the Tiller Girls as the epitome of the “mass ornament” to the critic Edmund Wilson’s ambivalent admiration of the precise “goose-stepping” on display at the Ziegfeld Follies—holds a key. Descriptions of precision dancing consistently evoke military and scientific comparisons, thus marking the conceptual hinge on which precision’s value rests (precision weapon/precision instrument)—the fine distinction, as Elaine Scarry has pointed out, between harmful violence and healing surgery. “Precision,” as a value, thus mediates across morcellizing aesthetics, variously violent or analytical (knowledge-producing), as much infusing mass entertainment with the thrill of the bomb as domesticating the bomb’s-eye view, whose logics, as Paul Virilio and Donald MacKenzie have examined, date from the first World War. Film representation of white female precision dancers conventionally toggles between aerial representations of their bodies as bomb targets, on one hand, and face-level views of quasi-military drills that project them as potential soldiers as well. White chorines’ bodies in the early twentieth century thus realize the aesthetics of precision in repeated visually pleasurable dismemberments and restorations to the whole (for example, a rosette of seemingly detached legs, filmed from above, resolving into serial close-ups of smiling girls, their limbs miraculously reattached—supersoldiers with a smile). Examining the film choreography of Busby Berkeley, poems by the modernist poet Marianne Moore, and writing about the Ziegfeld Follies by two of Moore’s colleagues at the little magazine The Dial, Edmund Wilson and Gilbert Seldes, this paper explores the early twentieth-century gendering of precision as a prehistory to contemporary frames of the “surgical” drone strike and the elevation of the (female, usually white) technocrat—Janet Yellen, Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton—who is “good with details” or “a real Hermione Granger.” The white female technocrat, her body still scrutinized, symbolically uncovered, and fantasmatically morcellized, emerges as the ideal dispassionate wielder of the healing bomb-as-scalpel.

Author

• Natalia Cecire, University of Sussex